Paper long abstract:

The paper draws on Sen's capability framework for health equity and the idea of Assisted Reproductive Technologies as 'global assemblages' (Ong and Collier)to discuss the crises of reproductive ethics in India. Focussing on ethnographic work on the agency of infertile women and couples in western India, as well as those women who provide surrogacy services to infertile couples from abroad, the paper discusses the implications and limitations of state and medical regulation. The paper emphasises the significance of taking into account the local moral worlds of the infertile, as a means to imagine a contextually based ethics.